I was just installed at site. Tomorrow at 7 I’ll be meeting the officials and other folks in my town, so I’ll be getting up rather early. I’ve already met most of them, but this is the official meeting with both my counterpart and a Peace Corps official. Today we installed three people, and I was the last. It was a long day of driving, and it was sad to drive away from the two people we installed before me. I didn’t get to my site till about 19:00, and it turns out my counterpart is gone for the week, so I met with my other counterpart briefly, and moved all my chose into my house. I was really uplifted by how cute the other two volunteers who were with me (and are getting installed tomorrow) thought my house was. It made me feel like it was a good place with charm that I could live, instead of a place that was sort of dumpy that I had to do my best to make homey.

Anyway, I only had a minor onset of panic as everyone left, and am feeling suprisingly okay right now. Maybe that’s because tomorrow I will be seeing them again when I meet the town officials, but I think actually I’m just experiencing what I’ve been hoping all along: that the fear of how life will be at site is a lot worse than how life will actually be. Still, they say the first month at site is the hardest month of service, so I don’t expect I will always be this chipper.

I definitely have some fear that I won’t be able to hack it and I’ll have to ET, but I’m trying to keep it in the back of my mind, because it doesn’t seem like it serves any useful purpose. My completing my service will depend in a large part on my refusal to give in to fears and the desire to isolate myself in my house. If I can get out and walk around and chat with people and feel like I have friends here, it will be a relative breeze.

Anyway, I just wanted to quickly note that the first night at sight is so far going well for me, despite how difficult I thought it would be.

Tomorrow I also have to buy tons of stuff. Right now I have burners and gas, and a trunk, but nothing else that I need. I need to buy buckets for bathing and a myriad of other stuff to outfit things And I also have to figure out how I want to set up my house, whether I want to go through the trouble and expense of replacing my huge bed with a smaller bed that takes up less space, and whether I can and want to get rid of some of the other furniture in here. There being only one room, I want to do my best to open up space. Right now I’m thinking I’ll get the small bed and then commission a countertop for my cooking space, and then I will have a table and a couple chairs, and the rest of my room will be open space. I also want to buy some rugs, some decorations, and other cool stuff, but that will come later. Petite a petite.

I have to remember not to try to get everything done at once. I have three months to go about setting up and learning about my community before I start working, and the better job I do of that, the better I’ll know people and the better my work will be when it starts.